Professional Biography

Mike, retired from professional life as Senior Director of Consulting Services, Huffmaster Crisis Response, LLC. He was responsible for developing the service line, then supporting customers with security consulting and investigations services for the company. In that capacity he managed client security program evaluation, corporate policy and procedure development, federal security compliance initiatives, corporate investigations, security threat and vulnerability analysis, and business risk management. Just prior to his retirement he created the vision for the corporate reorganization and functional consolidation of the company. He is the former president and ten-year owner of Meridian Security Management, Inc., a Michigan corporation with similar services.

Mike was the Corporate Director of Security at AlliedSignal, Inc., a fifteen-billion-dollar corporation that sat on the Dow Jones Industrials and was a Fortune Fifty company and which is now Honeywell in Morristown, NJ. Mike led all aspects of security. He drafted and built the business plan and implemented the vision for developing a global security services solution and managed nearly $30 million in budgetary responsibility across the three business units of the company – automotive, aerospace and chemical. These services included investigations, guard force management, intellectual property protection, global ethics hotline and investigations, and international travel risk management.

Mike was Assistant Vice President for Risk Management at Aetna Insurance Companies, in Hartford, Connecticut where he was responsible for directing over 300 employees in the security department, the disaster recovery and business continuity functions, and the insurance risk management and loss control departments. He was responsible for developing the Risk Management department’s organization, vision, mission, goals and objectives and for allocating and recovering $28 million in budgetary accountability. He oversaw and created insurance vehicles for managing global investment and corporate risk for the corporation. He was responsible for designing and implementing the secure information systems solutions for his five departments. His disaster management and business continuity plan was responsible for having an Aetna, four-hundred employee, business critical function up and running the next day, following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing where that function was once housed.

While at Sprint Telecommunications Mike was Director of Security - Corporate Security from their headquarters in Kansas City, MO.  Sprint was one of the first three long-distance telephone companies in the world. Mike had over 200 employees and was responsible for developing and managing an $11 million budget.  The Department grew from six employees in a small office to over 220 employees in a multi-story building in less than 90 days. Subsequently, the security department reduced toll fraud expense at Sprint from $28 million per year to $4.6 million, a target considered an acceptable solution by the executive management, of this multi-billion-dollar corporation.

He was the Director of Corporate Security for The Valeron Corporation of Troy, Michigan, which had over forty facilities in Michigan, South Carolina and Texas. There he created and managed the first corporate-wide security function. He was responsible for security system design and implementation and guard force contract management. He conducted all investigations for the corporation. While there, he rolled out the corporate-wide Intellection Property Protection Program for all of General Telephone and Electric (GTE), which acquired Valeron in the early 1980s.

He was a decorated sergeant with numerous commendations and citations while on the Detroit Police Department, where he was assigned to the First Precinct, The Elite Tactical Mobile Unit and the highly secret Wayne County Organized Crime Task Force. 

Mike was an adjunct instructor at Walsh College in Troy, Michigan, where he taught Masters level courses on Information Assurance. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Management from the University of Detroit.

Mike is a 45-year ASIS International member and a former Chairman of the Detroit Chapter of ASIS International.  He was also a partial-term ASIS Michigan Regional Vice President and held every chapter office and nearly every committee chair position. He established the ASIS Mentor Program for the Chapter, and served for over twenty years on the Board of Directors’ Nominating Committee.

He has held uninterrupted board certification as a Certified Protection Professional (CPP) since 1985, and in 2016 he was granted the honors of Life CPP and Life Member of ASIS International, the most prestigious security organization in the world.

Mike was a frequent guest speaker on business and security related subjects at businesses, colleges and universities, and at seminars, organizational and civic meetings throughout the country. Mike was an invited repeat speaker at the annual ASIS International Seminar and Exhibits and its other functions, speaking on telecommunications fraud, security liability, security leadership, organizational development, convergence, terrorism, risk assessment and management, and investigations.  He was a member of ASIS’s Food Defense and Agriculture Security Council and was a member of the National Association of Chemical Distributors and the Society of Chemical Manufacturers and Affiliates out of Washington, DC, contributing to US policy on anti-terrorism chemical security. He was a frequent speaker at US Department of Homeland Security seminars and annual training events around the country, addressing the subject of Chemical Security and Terrorism. He was considered a national leading expert on the subject of Federal compliance with the Chemical Facilities Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS.)

He was a founding member and served on the Board of Advisors of the FBI sponsored Infragard – Eastern Michigan Chapter, and was a 2^nd vice President of The Special Agents Association of Greater Detroit. He was on the Board of Directors of Asylum Hill, Inc., a philanthropic investment company in Hartford, CT managing millions of dollars of corporate charitable contributions. He was appointed to the Sprint Human Resources Executive Compensation Committee. He was also a member of Leadership Greater Hartford to introduce newcomers, businesses and tourists to the history, sights and culture of the Hartford area.  He was a Patron of the Mark Twain House, in Hartford. He was a standing member of the Kansas City Toastmasters. He volunteered as a member of the advisory council of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Southeast Michigan, Vic Wertz Club in Utica, Michigan.

He is currently the author of three international fiction mysteries: A DAY LATE, A DOLLAR SHORT, and CARTE BLANCHE, and one non-fiction, autobiographical, police-procedural story addressing workplace stress in law enforcement: OFFICER IN TROUBLE.